As has been seen, Balzac spent almost ten years in forming his hand and chastening his style, and the courage which he then manifested was equaled only by the patience with which he sought to improve the coloring of his afterwork. As a grammarian he is unsurpassed, and the faults which are noticeable in many of his works are for the most part purely clerical, and due to his mania for writing his books on proof-sheets instead of in manuscript. As an innovator he was of course attacked,—all innovators are,—and Sainte-Beuve, whose manner of writing Balzac had characterized as macaroni, continually ridiculed his style and form of expression. In this respect, however, it should be remembered that at the time of Balzac’s advent into literature the French language had been passed through a strainer so fine that no terms remained to express anything beyond the purely conventional; and Balzac, who was thoroughly impressed with Aristotle’s idea that the inexpressible does not exist, was almost obliged to create a language of his own; and in his endeavor to express himself with realistic clearness he seized upon every suggestive technicality which he encountered in science, in the green room, the alcoves of the hospital, or the by-ways of Paris, and built a vocabulary from all that was most expressive in the different strata of existence. It was he who invented “chic” and many other terms of an equally felicitous nature. “As for neologisms, as the critics call them,” he said, “who, I would like to know, has a right to give alms to a language, unless it be its writers? Of course I create words, but my parvenus will become nobles in time.” But through discipline and constant attention Balzac’s style assumed at last the undulatory rhythm of the Romantic school, and became not only picturesque, mathematical, and peculiarly incisive, but the model of many of the prominent writers of to-day. The attacks of the critics were not confined, however, to his style and form of expression; charges of personal as well as literary immorality were brought against him, and it is curious to note that while Venice reveled through an entire carnival in a masquerade of his characters his books were prohibited in Rome and Madrid.